IT HAS been almost six decades
since the Holocaust, but some people still deny it ever
happened.

Deborah
Lipstadt will speak about her
legal battle with a Holocaust
denier at 8 p.m. today in the EMU Ballroom, part of the
local commemoration of Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Lipstadt, the Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish
and Holocaust Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, was
involved in a six-year fight with English historian David
Irving, who has questioned whether 6 million Jews really
were killed by Nazis during World War II.

Irving sued
Lipstadt for libel when she called him a Nazi sympathizer in
her book, "Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on
Truth and Memory." The professor said the trial was
especially taxing because it took place in an English
courtroom.

"In England, in terms of libel, one is guilty
unless proven innocent," she said in a telephone interview.
"The legal battle consumed my life for six years. In many
times, it was a long and disturbing fight."

Oregon Hillel
Director Hal Applebaum said Lipstadt is one of the
world's leading authorities on Holocaust denial.

"Holocaust denial is out there -- people and
groups say it never took place," Applebaum said. "We should
not forget, lest it happen again."

Lipstadt said people deny the past for
differing reasons. One of them she calls "inconvenient
history."

"When history is troublesome, you can try to
rewrite it," she said, adding people such as Irving are
motivated to rewrite terrible events because of personal
biases such as anti-Semitism.

"This
guy has said some racist things," she said.

Lipstadt said there could have been many
implications had Irving won the trial. She said if people
could believe the Holocaust never happened, some would
believe Nazis were good people. Some people in the United
States have used such thinking to ignore the slaughter of
American Indians and the cruelty of the Ku Klux Klan, she
said.

The verdict "felt great because so many
survivors had been moved by this," she said, adding that for
people who weathered the Holocaust, the victory was about
remembering lost loved ones as well as reaffirming
history.

The author is currently finishing a new book
about the trial, and HBO is producing
a movie for next year.

Deborah
Lipstadt: Mr Irving's request for
information

WE
KNOW the reasons why Deborah Lipstadt was refused
tenure at the southern California university where
she used to teach, and transferred to her present
lowly position at Emory, the "Coca-Cola" university
of Atlanta. For court use in future, we should like
to obtain chapter and verse. The L.A. University
refuses to divulge data on personnel matters. Who
can assist? This is believed to be one of the
reasons why Lipstadt declined to testify on oath
(like Taking the Fifth) in London.
[Confidential
information to ]

Half an hour before tonight's lecture, members
of the University's Jewish Student Union will begin their
annual "reading of the names," where students read names of
Holocaust victims out of a book for 24 consecutive hours at
the EMU Amphitheater. Because the list is so long, only the
names of people who perished in Germany will be read.

"So many Jews in Europe perished that for many
of them, all that's left are statistics," JSU Director
Daniel Gruber said. "What we are doing is remembering
them."

Gruber said he expects only one letter of the
alphabet to be completed in 24 hours.